


Hollowing

by abel_runners



Category: Zombies Run!
Genre: Character Study, Gen, POV First Person, Season 3 Spoilers, this is....dramatic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-29
Updated: 2017-06-29
Packaged: 2018-11-21 05:32:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11350890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abel_runners/pseuds/abel_runners
Summary: Death comes for us all, but not always in the ways we expect her to.





	Hollowing

**Author's Note:**

> Season 3 spoilers.

First, Death came to me in the news. Flu outbreak, it said. Started in London. Wash your hands. Don't cough on others. Go to the hospital if your symptoms get worse. In a week or so, this would pass on. When that didn’t happen, of course, it got more frantic. They started calling it the Grey Flu. There were quarantines. Rumours about biting. I didn't believe it—maybe I didn't want to. Maybe I didn't want to see the way Death winked at me in the corners of bus shelters and coffee shops. Eventually, though, my best friend called me in a panic. Told me to get on a bus and get to a military base, _now_. I laughed it off, at first, but the edge to his voice made me uneasy. A little nauseous. So I clicked on the news, and saw the footage: hordes of greying, shambling sick people. Death leered at me from the corner of my room, but I avoided her gaze as I packed my bag, and I got on that bus, and I made it to Mullins with my life.

The second time, Death came to me in a chopper. A fire-hot explosion. A panicked parachute jump. A terrifying trek through monster-infested woods. Death was at my side the whole time, arms reaching for my neck. She was only kept at bay through the operator's voice in my ear, a tugging survival instinct in my gut, and the files clutched tightly in my hands. Death faded into a lingering mist as I stumbled through those gates. Still, I couldn't help but imagine her cold presence next to me for all those long nights after. I couldn't help but notice her lurking in the under-circles of Sam's eyes, or in the way Maxine's hands always trembled, just a little.

After that, I had countless close brushes with Death. Sometimes, I'd see her haunting the shadows of the gates, pointing at the other runners with a hollow expression, as if knowing some of them were never going to come back home. Other times, I'd sense her hovering at my shoulder, the overgrown city surrounding me as I ran, panicked. Maybe it was a horde at my heels, or gunshots whizzing too close to my head for comfort, or my comms shutting off with dread-inducing static. I saw her behind my friends, her hands placed gently on their shoulders as they died. She'd stare at me with some sort of pity, maybe, as my eyes went red and wet, face puffy with grief.

Although she was never good news, I got used to Death. I got used to seeing her behind me, hand always hovering at my shoulder, but never quite reaching. She became part of my job. A thing I kept outrunning, over and over. In time, I became comfortable, almost, seeing her there.

I'd never understood—not really—that Death could reap something non-physical. Until one day, I finally did.

When Death came for me then, it was a slow walk towards the orchard bench I was hunched up in. She approached with a sly grin on her face, a loping pace, as if she knew she'd be allowed to take her time with me. This was a crumbling. A victory for her, finally. I felt her voice in my very bones:

_You almost stole my job right out from under me, Five, blowing up those ships and attacking your friends. So much horror and grief. So much blood on your hands. Don't you know there's always a price to pay?_

She flickered, a spectre of all shadow, and I saw Death in front of me, kneeling. She placed two bony fingers on my forehead, pressing down. She leaned in, whispering something I could not understand in a voice so cold my body went stone-still. My heart slowed, skin going clammy. She then looked me straight in the eye, all satisfaction and glint. And with one last victorious smirk, she disappeared. Job done.

A minute passed where I could not feel a thing. Then, something shifted, or strained, or maybe it was choked inside my chest.

I leaned forward, hands tightly clenched at my sides, as a thick weight spread through blood and tissue and bone. My body groaned with it, a terrible black ink, some sort of acid, slowly dissolving everything I had built for myself. Everything I'd become.

It was the dissolution of Runner Five, the hero, the never-faltering, the untouchable. It was an un-becoming. It was a death of the internal self that I'd been nurturing for years; that I'd clung to when things got bad. It was the slow-like rotting of peaches left in the sun for too long. The losing of a jigsaw piece. A hollowing out. Some part of me died with all those people on the flotilla, and Death knew it, so she came for me. Physically, she'd still have to wait for a while longer. But spiritually, she'd been sated. And, with that, I paid her price.

I will always keep paying her price.


End file.
